Writing in science and marketing—Are they really separate worlds?

Emotional advertising versus rational science—is there any greater contradiction? Thus, we were understandably surprised when a seminar sponsor asked us to prepare a single workshop to cover both scientific writing and health care copywriting in German.

We wondered whether a oneday seminar could do justice to the two topics, who the participants would be, and from which professions they would come. At the outset, we learned that most participants had one thing in common: an academic background in science, which—at least in Germany—frequently results in a cumbersome writing style. (…)

Obviously, the main objective of writing is to communicate effectively, making comprehensibility imperative. When planning our workshop, we therefore asked ourselves whether a concept of comprehensibility exists that could be applied to both scientific writing and copywriting in health care. Research revealed that in the 1970s, the ‘Hamburg School’ of linguistics promulgated a theory of comprehensibility whose framework assumes four dimensions: simplicity, structure, brevity, and stimulation [1]. This seemed to fit our needs for teaching comprehensibility perfectly ... (vollständiger Text im Download)